Akshay Bhansali 🇮🇳

One Step at a time!🚶‍♂️

[VJ @VijayThk]

There is only one word that separates Ordinary from Extraordinary: Extra.

And I think that word explains a lot about life.

If you do what everyone does,
work like everyone works,
learn like everyone learns,
and live exactly like everyone lives…
Why would you expect an extraordinary outcome?
There is always something extra behind extraordinary results.
Extra effort.
Extra patience.
Extra Risk.
Extra discipline.
Extra learning.
Extra courage.
Extra consistency.

The difference is not always talent.

Sometimes it's simply the willingness to do a little more, for a little longer, when nobody is watching.

You don't become extraordinary by doing ordinary things perfectly once.
You become extraordinary by doing the right things consistently, with that extra effort, for years.
Ordinary + Extra = Extraordinary.
Maybe it's that simple.

#MasterInOne

[Akshay Bhansali 🇮🇳 @apbhansali]

@Suresh_kumar047 Do you trade this intraday? There are almost daily green days of profit booking.

[Nick Schmidt @NickSchmidt]

There is power in not knowing

[Noah Ryan @NoahRyanCo]

Do whatever you can to claw your way out of dopamine culture

[Akshay Bhansali 🇮🇳 @apbhansali]

@dayendtrader Congratulations! Neel bhai

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail.

She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage.

Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists.

She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment.

This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action.

Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call.

- @multiplanet1

[Akshay Bhansali 🇮🇳 @apbhansali]

AI Layoffs

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:

Team,

Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future.

Why now
Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both.

First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.

Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.

All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.

What this means
To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice?

- Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles.

- No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

- AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.

To those who are affected
I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done.

All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information.

To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements.

Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters.

How we move forward
To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together:

Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it.

The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission.

Brian

[Mahavir Chopra / Beshak.org @themahavir]

Babumoshai,
Term insurance BADAA hona chahiye LAMBAA nahi.

For a 30 year old
In ~17K you can get 1 Cr cover till age 85
Instead in ~17K get *2 Cr* cover till age 65

Term Insurance covers your family from an early demise.
Once you grow above 55, your networth should take care of your family.

Waise bhi - value of 1 Cr by age 85 will be today's 4 Lakhs (6% inflation)
What's the point?

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Be rich. But never talk about money. Be fit. But never talk about working out. Be sharp. But never mention books. You're a man. Never let excitement make you announce things prematurely. Stay low-key and move silently. you'll never regret it.

[Karan Rajpal @IronyMeter]

When I wrote this year, I did not know the scale Vietnam's Phu Quoc will achieve.

The Phu Quoc island, alone, did 7 million foreign tourist arrivals last year.

INDIA, THE COUNTRY, did 9 million arrivals, in which I'd think a lot of NRIs with foreign passport are included.

I am as excited for the hotel industry as the next investor, but it needs more than just good hotels to pull foreign tourists.

My mind is boggled.

[Mike @MarketMike]

Nobody is talking about the 12 month rate of change on oil right now. They should be.

WTI crude's ROC(12) just spiked to over 91%. Let me show you what happened every other time it did this.

- 1987 Crash.
- 1990 Crash.
- Dot Com Bust.
- 2008 Financial Crisis.
- 2022 Bear Market.

Every single spike of this magnitude on the 12 month rate of change has led to something breaking. Every. Single. Time.

Do you really think this time we just walk away unscathed?

This is your warning shot.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Private equity has poured over $1 trillion into US healthcare in the last decade. 2025 set a record: $191 billion in deal value. The money goes in to own the debt structure, not to fix the hospitals.

The playbook is mechanical. PE firm acquires hospital using leveraged debt. The debt lands on the hospital’s balance sheet. The PE firm charges management fees to the hospital, sometimes for services never rendered. The hospital now owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed, plus annual fees to the people who put it in debt. To service those obligations, the hospital cuts staff.

The Harvard/University of Chicago study quantified what “cut staff” means in an emergency room. ER salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Headcount fell 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found surgical patients at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days.

488 hospitals are PE-owned as of 2025. A quarter of all US emergency rooms. Texas alone has 108. New Mexico: 36.2% of all hospitals.

Steward Health Care is the clearest case study. Cerberus Capital bought the chain, loaded it with debt, then sold the hospital real estate to a REIT. Steward now paid hundreds of millions in annual rent on buildings it used to own. CEO Ralph de la Torre collected over $250 million in personal compensation. He bought a $40 million yacht, a $15 million fishing boat, two private jets worth $33 million each, and an 11,000 square foot Dallas mansion next to George W. Bush. He flew the corporate jet 582 times in two years. He visited his own Massachusetts hospitals seven times. Each trip lasted less than a day.

Steward filed for bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared. De la Torre was held in contempt by the United States Senate for refusing to testify. He attended the Olympic equestrian events in Paris while his emergency rooms went dark.

This tells you everything about how the model actually works. The fund makes money at acquisition, at the real estate sale, and at the fee extraction. The mortality spike happens after all three. The IRR is already locked in before the death rate moves.

The capital keeps flowing because the returns don’t depend on the hospital surviving.

[Felix Prehn 🐶 @felixprehn]

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends.

A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets.

Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses.

The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits.

A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days.

Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive.

The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away.

The investing angle nobody talks about.

Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in.

Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies.

The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates.

Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try.

(a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is actually insane

> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?”

one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.

we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

[Akshay Bhansali 🇮🇳 @apbhansali]

Temple Economy @ankitatIIMA

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Six temples collected ₹24,000 crore in cash in one year. India has 20 lakh temples. Nobody knows the real total.

The NSSO estimates the annual value of India's temple economy at ₹3 lakh crore, about 2.3% of GDP. AP CM Chandrababu Naidu puts it at ₹6 lakh crore. When LawStreet Journal filed RTIs asking state governments how much their temples actually collect, not a single state could answer. 18 states control over 4 lakh temples, and nobody has a number. The real economy runs on cash, informal labour, and millions of daily transactions in flowers, oil, lamps, and puja supplies that never touch a ledger.

Tirupati alone has a net worth of ₹3 lakh crore, annual revenue of ₹4,385 crore, 10 tons of gold in banks, and a FY25 budget of ₹5,140 crore, bigger than most Indian cities' municipal budgets. Padmanabhaswamy Temple holds ₹1.2 lakh crore in vault treasures, with one vault still sealed by a Supreme Court order. Shirdi does ₹320-400 crore in revenue per year. The Golden Temple spends ₹500 crore to provide free meals to 1 lakh people daily.

Indians spend ₹4.74 lakh crore a year on religious travel. That's more than educational travel. 55% of all domestic tourism in India is religious. ₹1,316 crore flows through this system every single day.

Then there's Ayodhya. Before the Ram Mandir, the city got 1-2 crore visitors a year. By mid-2025, that crossed 22 crore. Vatican City gets 0.9 crore. Mecca gets 2 crore. Ayodhya beat both combined in year one. IIM Lucknow found that trader incomes jumped 5x, property rates rose 5-10x, 150+ new hotels opened, and the tourism economy is projected to reach ₹10,000 crore annually.

Now digital is making some of this visible for the first time. Sri Mandir, India's largest Hindu devotional app, crossed ₹100 crore run rate in early 2025. 4 crore downloads, 35 lakh monthly active users, ₹175 crore Series C led by Susquehanna. 12 lakh devotees performed 52 lakh online pujas across 70 temples last year. 20% of revenue comes from the diaspora, where per-user spend is ₹7,000, compared to ₹600-800 in India.

₹3 lakh crore is what gets counted. The actual number, including every cash hundi, every roadside garland seller, and every unreported landholding across 20 lakh temples, is multiples of that. A parallel economy, mostly in cash, mostly untracked, running 365 days a year.

[trinētrā 🦢 @__ILLUMINATED]

Our western brethren discovering Dhuno

[Normal Guy @Normal_2610]

Interesting Insight :)

Total capex-to-GDP is stuck at 3.2%, not accelerating. And critically, the budget relies heavily on ₹80,000 crore from divestment plus ₹3.16 trillion in dividends from RBI and PSU banks.

These are aggressive assumptions.

The real story is hidden in the borrowing numbers. Rs 17.2 trillion gross borrowing is 17% higher than last year.

Add Rs 13.5 trillion in state borrowing. That is Rs 30 trillion of government paper hitting the market.

Bond yields already at 1 year high. RBI bought Rs 6.5 trillion bonds last year. Same game will repeat. Private sector gets crowded out.

Divestment has failed year after year. If these receipts fall short the math breaks. Either cut spending or borrow more. Market is right to worry about this.

Net FDI below 10 billion dollars for a 4 trillion dollar economy is a problem. FPIs have not added net money for over 5 years.

Budget had a chance to cut capital gains tax or reduce STT. Instead they raised STT. Message is clear. Government does not need foreign money. Domestic SIPs will carry the load. That is a big bet.

There's nothing wrong with this budget But there's nothing that changes the narrative for global investors who are already bearish on India.

Those who are negative will stay negative, citing high valuations, capital gains tax, and weak earnings.

The private sector capex revival everyone has been waiting for? This budget won't trigger it depend on how yu reading this :)

[Raghava Krishna | రాఘవ కృష్ణ @Anviksiki]

After Yoga, Ayurveda, West discovers Japa.

[ameet singh @ameetgsingh]

Bharat Mandapam

Pune’s getting one.

The aero mall was made on a plot which was exclusively reserved for parking.
They technically did make a parking lot except that the mall also came along with the lot. But, wait a minute wasn’t the entire lot supposed to be only parking. Well yes, but what’s wrong if the airport passengers get a mall to boot eh…

This is how public land is often misused or abused or subverted for “so called” public purposes over and above what’s envisaged by the DP. So, Parking P = Mall M.,

There is 32 acres now approximately besides the Airport Aero Mall if you like. The entire land is going to be diverted to build a convention centre called Bharat Mandapam.

What will be subsumed in this 32 Acres.

Two roads on the grid which access the airport. 18 metre and 36 metre respectively.

A public school. The argument being given is kids prefer private schools over PMC schools. So school is secondary.

A Garden, The people can do with one more mall instead of a Garden. Kids can play in a mall instead.

It’s not over yet, Hold your breath.

A Hospital.
Despite Pune having a tremendous shortfall of hospital beds. No institution like AIIMS. No public hospital in full operation since Sassoon which is the district hospital built way back in 1867 and has only 1500 beds with the BJ Medical College affiliated with it producing only 250 Doctors per year. The Hospital project will also get cancelled and transmogrified into Bharat Mandapam.

Let’s go over this again.?

No Garden. No School. No Roads.,
No Hospital

All of the above = Bharat Mandapam.

The area in question = 32 Acres
The FSI possible under UDCPR = 9
The total area built up will equal
108,00,000 square feet.
That’s 1 crore 8 lakh square feet.
Or
Almost, 11 million square feet.
Give or take a few feet.

This place can attract crowds between 40,000 to 100,000 people.
Think Subroto Roy Sahara Stadium in Viman Nagar next to the airport.

Where will the traffic go,
It will go past the small bottlenecked underpass in Ramwadi or via Yerwada chowk or through Viman Nagar. Since we have made VN into one way lanes, why complain.

How much traffic already exists ?

About a lakh people commute to the airport every day via these routes and an additional couple of lakhs commute to the IT parks and neighbouring areas of Vishrantwadi, Dighi, Alandi, Chakan Moshi and Kalyaninagar, Magarpatta, Kharadi using these routes in the same east of Pune. Adding a few thousand cars and buses won’t do much just throw this or these three entry exits (majorly two) into a gridlock Everytime Bharat Mandapam has something happen there.

The two road capacity has been overwhelmed already. Besides, Pune Airport with its new terminal building is ambitiously planning on doubling its flights. It does approximately 200 today and over 40,000 people commute to and fro via air. Doubling will take the number upto 400 or 500 and about a lakh people flying.

The metro left out the airport in their route planning. As an after thought they’ve added a shuttle bus to the nearest metro station 2.5 kms away & even that’s never available every 5 minutes as was the promise. Reason = Traffic.

Building a crore plus commercial high rise sq ft will mean over a million tons of concrete will get poured into this project. Concrete absorbs heat of over 1100 joules per kg directly from sunlight falling on it. Temperatures on concrete are typically 2X what it’s in the atmosphere.

How will this get offset ?

Who will cool this building and light it.
Electricity for such energy intensive projects will mean over 500 kWh / square meter / annum.

Or

55 crore units of electricity.

Where will this come from ?
How will this get offset ?

What will be the environmental impact of this monster structure ?

How much water will it consume ?

90% of Vimannagar is already tanker dependent. The airport and Aero Mall get water supply via tanker.

Bharat Mandapam, at what cost to us ?

Pune ?

[Sindhu Biswal @sindhubiswal]

I know a 35-year-old married couple in India. No kids by choice.
Household income is strong. House almost paid off.
Good investments. Foreign trips every year. Comfortable life.
Looks sorted from the outside.
But in the long run, this choice usually backfires.
In India, money without family responsibility mostly turns into consumption. Bigger cars. Better phones. Another vacation to the same three places with different hotel names.
At some point, experiences stop feeling new.
Kids aren’t just an expense here. They’re continuity. Legacy. A reason to stay sharp, relevant, grounded.
Ask older Indians what gave their life meaning. Almost none will talk about gadgets or trips. They talk about their children, the sacrifices, the chaos, the pride.
Comfort is addictive in your 30s.
Loneliness is brutal in your 60s.
Choosing ease over building something bigger feels smart today.